Lanvin and Alber Elbaz Are Playing The Blame Game

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The divorce between Lanvin and designer Alber Elbaz has gotten to a messy phase where the two are essentially fighting over friends and reputation. According to WWD, Elbaz is currently upset with Lanvin's owner Shaw-Lan Wang, who reportedly sent an email to the label's staff blaming the quality of the designs for its financial woes. Elbaz fired back that those claims were "unjustifiable" and threw blame back on the business side of the company, citing a lack of strategy and investment for weakening sales.

Elbaz also threatened to give a tell-all interview so that he could defend himself or to take legal action against the company if they continued to run his name through the mud. We'd be willing to bet that Elbaz would have the support of a staff that was reportedly rioting after the news of his departure.

However, Lanvin's CEO Michèle Huiban also said in the email obtained by WWD that management and Elbaz had an extremely frayed relationship. Elbaz was allegedly aggressive towards management and was imploring Wang to sell the label. "The fundamentals of the business are healthy, its shareholder and governance are solid, the brand is strong, the strategy is clear," Huiban wrote in the email.

The whole debacle adds even more significance to the last line from Elbaz's statement regarding his departure from Lanvin. "I wish the house of Lanvin the future it deserves...and hope that it finds the business vision it needs to engage in the right way forward," he said at the time.